BSides Tampa IT Security Conference: Saturday, April 1

This year’s edition of BSides Tampa, Tampa Bay’s community-led IT security conference, happens Saturday, April 1 at USF’s Muma College of Business. This will be a special one, as it’s BSides Tampa’s 10th anniversary!

BSides Tampa is sponsored by the Tampa Bay chapter of (ISC)², which is clever and mathematically-correct shorthand for “International Information System Security Certification Consortium”. (ISC)² is a non-profit specializing in training and certifying information security professionals.

BSides gets it name from “b-side,” the alternate side of a vinyl or cassette single, where the a-side has the primary content and the b-side is the bonus or additional content. In 2009, when the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas received way more presentation submissions than they could take on, the rejected presenters (who still had very could presentations; there just wasn’t enough capacity for them) banded together and made their own “b-side” conference that ran in parallel with Black Hat. From that event came BSides.

BSides conferences are community events, and unlike a lot of tech conferences, they’re inexpensive. BSides Tampa 2023 costs $45 to attend, and its supplementary workshops are $5 each.

I plan on attending, and if you’re interested in diving deeper into security, you should too!

Register for BSides Tampa 2023 here!